The phoneme
Date: 2015-10-07; view: 586.
- Basic concept of phonetics
- Smallest unit of language, existing as such speech sound which is capable of differentiating one word from another, or one grammatical form from another.
- Speech sound that makes a difference in meaning
- A class or family of sounds regarded as a single sound and represented in transcription by the same symbol
- Abstractional and generalized in character exists in our minds as an abstraction and at the same time is generalized in speech in the form of its allophones
Phoneme may be pronounced differently in different ws but still remain the same phoneme pleat-play-wale
2 main classes of phonemes: vowels and consonants
Pairs of ws that demonstrate a phonemic contrast – minimal pairs (discovered by method of commutation)
MP – differ only in 1 element
actually pronounced sound is always anallophone
different allophones of 1 phoneme have one or more acoustic, articulatory features in common, but may have slight difference due to the adjust sounds or other purely phonetic factors.
Allophone that has all acoustic, articulatory features given in classification – a sound in isolation or the principle variant of phoneme
All others – subsidiary variants
to mix allophones – non-phonological, allophonic mistake
to mix phonemes – phonemic, phonological mistake
Phonological analysis:
The two main problems:
1) the establishment of the phonemic inventory for a language (áóêâû, ÷òî ôîíåìà, ÷òî àëëîôîí)
Methods:
Distributional –is based on the phonological rule, that different phonemes can occur in one and the same position, while allophones of one and the same phoneme occur in different positions (cat-rat/ cat-skate). It's possible to establish the phonemic status of any sound just by contrasting it with the other sound without knowing the meaning of the words.
Semantic – attaches great importance to meaning. It's based on the assumption that a phoneme can distinguish words only when opposed to another phoneme or zero in an identical phonetic context (ask”0”-asks). Pairs of words differing only in one sound are called minimal pairs.
2) the establishment of the inventory of phonologically relevant elements for a given language.
L. Blomfield (American descriptive linguist) considered it impossible to identify the phonemes of a language without recourse to meaning in the ordinary sense of word.
Great phonemic dissimilarity – entirely or greatly different sounds, such as a vowel and a consonant cannot be allophones of the same phoneme. 
Conditioned allophonic similarity – the more or less similar sounds which are at the same time more or less different, are allophones of the same phoneme if the difference between them is clearly due to the influence of purely external phonetic factors, such as neighbouring sounds, stress, etc..
Vowels:
· All vowels are oral sounds (articulated through mouth, sometimes partially nasal)
· All vowels are voiced
· Are characterized by free flow of air through the oral cavity
· Distinguishing features are made by tongue position
Opinions:
- some say of 12 vowels, excluding difthongues
- sm speak of 20 vowels, 2 monoft. + 8 diphthongues
- sm speak of 21 vowels (Russian linguists)
monof. –vowels, pronounced in a way that during pronunciation organs of speech do not change their position
dif. – when pronouncing, organs start in the position of one vowel and gradually move to the position of other vowel. 1st vowel– nucleus, 2nd - a glide
[ei] [ai] [oi]
[au] [ou]
[iý] [iý] [iý]
American dif-s [ai] [au] [oi]
Sm single out [oý]
May be classified according to:
-position of the tongue (horizontal, neither advanced nor retrected)
-position of lips
-acc 2 length
-acc 2 degree of tenseness
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